First-Time Author Questions Answered by an Editor

An editor answers the questions first-time authors ask most, from review timelines and preprints to APC waivers, chasing emails and journal legitimacy.

Q&A · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

“How long will review take?”

It varies by field and reviewer availability. Distrust guarantees of acceptance in days. Learn the real process: Peer Review Process

The variation is not evasiveness. Your manuscript sits in a queue whose length nobody fully controls. The editor has to find reviewers who are qualified, unconflicted and willing, and each invitation can sit unanswered for days before it is declined and the search starts again. Fields where reviewing is a routine expectation move faster than fields where the same small group of people is asked for everything. The end of a teaching term, the weeks around a major conference and the middle of summer all slow things down.

What you can do is replace your own anxiety with a number from the journal. Many journals publish a median time to first decision; if yours does, take that figure and add a margin, because a median means half of all papers took longer than that. If it publishes nothing, ask the editorial office before you submit. Whether they answer, and how, tells you something either way.

Then plan around the answer rather than against it. If you need a publication in hand for a fellowship application four months from now, a journal whose first decisions typically take three months is not a plan, it is a hope — and a hope that fails quietly, because you will not discover it failed until the deadline is a fortnight away.

The guarantee is the part worth being firm about. Review takes as long as it takes because it depends on strangers reading your paper carefully, unpaid, in time they do not have. A journal that promises acceptance within a fixed number of days is telling you plainly that no such reading will happen. Read that promise as a description of what you are being sold.

“Can I preprint?”

Often yes — check journal policy and label the version correctly. See Academy guidance via Directive Academy.

The check takes a few minutes, and it has to happen before you post rather than after. Open the journal's author guidelines and look for a section headed preprints, prior publication, or sometimes media and embargo policy. Most journals now state explicitly that posting to a recognised preprint server does not count as prior publication. A minority still treat any public posting as prior publication, and some allow preprints but restrict when you may update them once the paper is under review. The order matters because a preprint cannot really be unposted: servers generally do not delete records, so a withdrawn preprint stays visible with a withdrawal notice attached.

Labelling is where first-time authors mostly go wrong. Three versions of your paper can exist at the same time — the preprint, the accepted manuscript, and the final published version — and they say different things. Put a line at the top of the preprint saying it has not been peer reviewed. When the paper is accepted, go back and add the journal reference and the DOI, so that anyone who lands on the preprint can find what review changed. Leaving a superseded preprint unlabelled is how a claim you later corrected keeps circulating in its original form, cited by people who never saw the correction.

At submission, declare the preprint and give its DOI — in the submission form if there is a field for it, and in your cover letter if there is not. Journals expect to be told. An editor discovering the preprint independently, halfway through review, costs you goodwill you had no reason to spend.

“Do I need to suggest reviewers?”

Helpful when done ethically. Read: Suggesting Reviewers

"Need" is usually the wrong word. On most submission forms the field is optional, and leaving it blank is not held against you. Fill it in when you can do it well, and skip it when you cannot.

Doing it well means naming people who could find the weakest section of your paper without asking you anything, and who owe you nothing. That second half rules out most of the names that come to mind first: recent co-authors, your supervisor, your own students, anyone at your institution, anyone on the same grant or in the same consortium, and anyone you thanked in the acknowledgements. The usable test is social rather than technical. If you would feel awkward telling the editor exactly how you know this person, do not list them.

Give an institutional email address taken from a source you can point at — the person's departmental page, their ORCID record, or the corresponding-author line of one of their own recent papers. Editorial staff use that address to confirm the person exists at the affiliation you claimed. An address that bounces, or that belongs to someone who moved two years ago, costs you a wasted invitation and a fortnight of silence. An address that cannot be verified at all moves your file into a check you cannot see and cannot chase.

Then expect the editor to use none of your names. That is the ordinary outcome, not a verdict on the paper. Editors keep their own reviewer pools, know who is currently overloaded, and often need something your list does not contain — a statistician for the modelling, or a second reader from outside your subfield entirely.

“What if I cannot pay an APC?”

Ask about waivers early and only after you confirm the journal is legitimate. Start at Directive Publications / For Authors.

The order in that sentence is most of the answer. Confirm the journal is real first, because a waiver conversation with a journal you should not be submitting to is wasted either way, and because an immediate offer to discuss a discount is a standard move from operations that exist to collect charges rather than to publish.

Then work outward from what you may already have. Ask your library whether your institution holds an agreement with the publisher that covers charges for corresponding authors; researchers pay charges their library had already covered more often than you would expect. Check whether your grant has a publication line, and whether your funder pays charges directly. Only when both come up empty is a waiver request the right instrument. It is also worth remembering that many well-regarded journals charge authors nothing at all to publish. If cost is the binding constraint on this paper, that is a legitimate criterion for deciding where to send it.

Ask before you submit, in a short email to the editorial office: the working title, the article type, a plain statement that you have no grant or institutional funding available to cover a charge, and a direct question about whether a waiver or reduction exists and how it is applied for. You want that answer in writing, and you want it while sending the paper somewhere else is still costless.

What goes wrong is almost always timing. An author submits, waits, revises twice, is accepted, and only then discovers a charge they cannot pay — at the exact moment they are least willing to walk away from a year of work. Journals that operate honestly state their charges plainly and up front. Ask early and you never have to find out the hard way which kind you are dealing with.

“Can I email the editor to hurry?”

One polite status inquiry after a reasonable wait is fine. Daily pressure emails are not.

"Reasonable" means past the journal's own stated timeline, or a clear margin beyond the norm in your field if it states none. Before you write, check the submission system. A status reading "under review" means the file is with reviewers and the editor is waiting on the same people you are.

Keep the email short and administrative. Write to the editorial office rather than the editor personally, put the manuscript number in the subject line, give the title and the submission date, and ask one question: whether there is any update on the status. Do not explain why you need a decision, do not attach anything, and do not restate the importance of the work. You are asking for a fact, not making a case.

If nothing comes back, wait a similar interval and send one follow-up. If the system has shown the same status for months, it is fair to ask directly whether the manuscript is still under active consideration — that question is answerable, and it gives someone a reason to open your file. If you decide to take the paper elsewhere, withdraw it in writing, wait for written confirmation, and only then submit it somewhere else. A manuscript under consideration at two journals at once is a serious problem, and it is yours rather than theirs.

The reason the daily email fails is simple. It does not create a reviewer. It creates work for the person who would otherwise be looking for one, and it leaves an impression that outlasts the manuscript.

“Is this journal safe?”

Use: Predatory journal checklist

Work through the checklist properly rather than glancing at the website, which is the cheapest part of the operation to make convincing. Look up three or four named editorial board members and confirm they exist at the institutions listed; where a board is genuine, members usually list the role on their own pages. Find the journal's stated peer review process and see whether it describes anything specific or only asserts that review is rigorous. Confirm the journal appears in the databases your field actually uses by searching those databases directly, rather than trusting a row of logos on the journal's own site. Check that a real postal address and a named publisher exist. Then read three recent papers and ask yourself whether they look edited.

Two signals deserve extra weight. The first is how the journal found you: an unsolicited email praising a paper of yours and inviting a submission to a journal outside your field is the standard opening. The second is speed — the promise of review in days discussed above, usually paired with a charge that only becomes clear late in the process.

If you are still unsure after all that, ask your librarian. Research librarians assess journals professionally and will usually give you an answer within a day; so will your research office. Neither will think less of you for asking, and both would far rather answer before you submit than after your only copy of a paper is sitting on a site that will not give it back.

How to ask a journal a process question

Every answer above depends on a habit most first-time authors never form: emailing a journal before submitting to it. This is normal and expected, and it is what the editorial office address is for.

Keep it to one email, with a clear subject line and no more than three questions, each answerable in a sentence — whether preprints are permitted, what the typical time to first decision is, whether waivers exist. Say who you are and the general area of the work. You do not need to describe the study, and you should not attach the manuscript.

The reply, or the absence of one, is itself information. A journal that answers a plain process question clearly and quickly is a journal that will probably communicate with you during review. One that answers with a sales pitch, or does not answer at all, has already told you what working with it would be like.

Bottom line

None of this takes seniority or nerve. It takes asking, in writing, while you have still committed nothing you cannot take back — which is the only window in which every answer above is still useful to you.

Ask clear process questions early — it prevents panicked questions later. Submit